Parshah Commentary

The recounting of the ten plagues that God wrought upon the Egyptians is among the most frequently “cutesified” parts of Passover; these curses have been immortalized in children’s songs (“frogs here, frogs there, frogs were jumping everywhere”), finger puppets, and other themed toys for the seder table. But as the Torah makes clear, the plagues—the first seven of which appear in this week’s parshah, Vaera, with the final three featured in next week’s parshah, Bo—are anything but whimsical. Why, we might wonder, does God see fit to unleash these particular forms of suffering on the people of Egypt? What is the significance of the Nile turning to blood, swarms of lice, or any of the other horrors the Torah describes?

The Rabbis answer this question with a moral principle: The plagues were “middah k’neged middah,” or “measure for measure.” The plague of blood, for example, was appropriate because the Egyptians, in an attempt to regulate Israelite sexuality and limit birthrates, prevented women from ritually immersing after menstruation. Frogs, the Rabbis go on to teach, flooded Egypt because the Egyptians compelled the Israelites to handle rodents and insects as part of their dehumanizing labor. (Indeed, one might read the words “swarming” and “creeping” in the midrash as parallel to the Torah’s terms describing the Israelites’ growth, thus implicitly linking the plague with the reality of forced population control.) And, the midrash’s argument continues, the Egyptians suffered from lice because the Israelites were forced to sweep public areas, and so the dust turned to lice that attacked the Egyptians.

One way of understanding “middah k’negged middah” is that God evaluates the sin at hand and actively chooses an appropriately corresponding curse. The Talmud, in the tractate of Rosh Hashanah, for example, explains that God goes so far as to “change the natural order” to enact parallel punishment. But there is another way to understand this principle. Rabbi Tali Adler points out that at least some of the plagues show the Egyptians the extent of the suffering they inflicted upon the Israelites. For example, she writes, blood “makes it clear that the Nile, the source of life for the Egyptian people . . . is actually a site of mass murder. All of Egypt, suddenly, is forced to confront the truth that what is life-giving and sustaining for them has been the locus of unbearable suffering for the people they oppress.” In this reading, the plagues are not simply a form of divine retribution but are instead a direct consequence of the Egyptians’ wrongdoings: The water turns to blood for the straightforward reason that it is quite literally saturated with the blood of Israelite babies. The plagues, then, are the empire’s atrocities made visible; they are middah k’negged middah, a parallel that is also an exposure. In her book Doppelganger, which deals extensively with doublings and recapitulations, Naomi Klein writes: “We sense that . . . even for the most resourced among us, the curtain hiding the suffering and the ugliness is badly frayed. That just as societies can flip into their monstrous doppelganger, so can the earth—from habitable to uninhabitable.” The plagues, for the Egyptians, are such a moment of collapse and reversal: Their world flips, and reveals its corresponding, constitutive horrors.

In discussing the subsequent drowning of the Egyptians in the sea, the Talmud in the tractate of Sotah likewise applies the concept of “middah k’negged middah”: “In the pot in which they cooked, they were cooked.” The Egyptians drowned Israelite infants, and so they too ultimately drowned. The Talmud goes on to explain that the reason the Egyptians had felt safe killing babies in this way was because they assumed they would be spared from “middah k’negged middah” punishment: “For the Holy Blessed One already took an oath not to bring a flood upon the world,” the Talmud explains, referencing God’s promise to Noah following the flood. The ruling class thought that they could use water to inflict horror because they would be exempt from punishment by water; they believed they had found a wily way to game the system and avoid the consequences of their actions—but, inevitably of course, they had to live in the world they created.

Klein argues in Doppelganger that when it comes to experiencing the “mirror side” of the world and of our actions, “doubles” are “warnings or harbingers.” She writes that ”when reality starts doubling, refracting off itself, it often means that something important is being ignored or denied—a part of ourselves and our world we do not want to see—and that further danger awaits if the warning is not heeded.” Indeed, after Pharaoh and the Egyptian ruling class ignore the warning posed by each plague, the punishments we encounter in Vaera escalate further with the death of the Egyptian firstborns in next week’s parshah, culminating in mass Egyptian death in the Sea of Reeds in the parshah after that. Because the evil empire of Egypt did not heed the warnings presented to them, they could not escape. So too even the most powerful of our day will not be able to hide from the impact of the cruelty and devastation that they have created as the invisibilized foundation of our daily life. Because in the end, we all must live in whatever world we build; we will all experience the shadow sides of our actions, measure for measure.

Avigayil Halpern is a rabbi and writer based in Washington, DC, whose work focuses on feminist and queer Torah. Read more of her writing here.